


What separates us from beasts

by fourbuzzfizzfive



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fawnlock, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:04:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourbuzzfizzfive/pseuds/fourbuzzfizzfive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fawnlock fic. If you're not all for that, don't read. Unless you're open-minded, in which case, come on in!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had a slightly different Fawnlock origins story in my head that wanted to come out. Also I wanted to write some of the mature stuff people have been craving because that's apparently how I roll. So, I decided to combine these two things. That means later on there will be some decidedly mature stuff. I suggest you get off this boat and back on dry land if that isn't your thing.
> 
> I apologise hartily for any bad puns I may include and also for the X-men references.

He was visibly different from the start.

Sherlock Holmes was born at home on 6th January 1981 at 23:37 with unusual markings covering his small body. Faint brown stripes encircled his forearms and dark brown spots littered his face, torso, and legs in an asymmetric fashion, most prominent over his shoulders and at the tops of his thighs. His parents would be happy to discover that he had all ten fingers and ten toes, but dismayed to find that they were deep brown in colour and a marked contrast to his otherwise pale skin.

His body _was_ mostly humanoid, with the major differences being his nose (dark, wet, and shaped like that of an animal) and his ears (triangular, lacking in the distinctive ridges of cartilage found in the human ear, and lightly furred).

There were two pea-sized bony protrusions on top of his head amid the smattering of dark hair. And he had a tail.

Mrs Holmes began to cry upon seeing him, crossed her arms over her chest, and turned away as best as she could while lying down and exhausted. She refused to take the baby from the doctor. Mr Holmes took one long look at the child, ignored the grasping fingers reaching out for him, and went to make a call about a non-disclosure agreement.

Mycroft Holmes had been standing at the door for an hour, back straight even in the face of his mother’s agonised cries, ready to enter and meet his sibling the instant he was allowed in. Once his mother’s cries stopped and the baby’s crying began, he knew it was only a matter of time.

So he wasn’t expecting it at all when his father charged through the door without looking at him or speaking to him.

Confused and unsettled, he cautiously went through into his mother’s bedroom. He was highly conscious of the fact that, once the door was open, he could again hear his mother crying.

The first thing he saw was reassuring: Doctor Monroe was there, holding something in his arms. Doctor Monroe had been their family doctor for years and Mycroft liked him in the way that he liked all adults better than he liked children his own age. At the grand age of nine, he was secure in the knowledge that he was now a young man, no longer a child who cried at the doctors’ surgery and had to be pacified with sweets.

The first thing he _heard_ was not reassuring at all.

“It’s a mutation,” Dr Monroe was saying to his mother. “I’ve seen it before; there was a girl in Birmingham who could make water-”

“I don’t care,” his mother said, her voice weak but loud enough to speak over him. “I don’t care what made my son this way. Whether it’s God or genes or a gypsy curse, I don’t _care_. Just take him away, please.”

Mycroft looked at the baby properly then. He knew a little about genes and mutations from his reading outside of school. He didn’t think that they could make a baby look like this one did though.

 “You’re right,” said the doctor, “he _is_ your son. He’s a baby and he needs his mother.”

Mycroft watched as his mother turned her red, tear-streaked face to look at Dr Monroe.

Her expression made Mycroft’s heart do something peculiar in his chest. “ _Mother_ ,” he said brokenly, when he could stand the feeling no longer, when he needed comfort too badly to keep silent.

“Mycroft,” she whispered, “I didn’t see you there. Sweetheart, you should go back to bed. Where’s Lucy? She’ll take you.”

Lucy had gone to bed with the rest of the servants an hour ago, after she played (and lost) five consecutive games of chess with Mycroft to distract him from his mother’s intensive labour going on upstairs. He had been so eager to meet his sibling, so full of questions: would it be a boy or girl? Would the baby grow up to be smart like him? Would they play chess together one day? Would his sibling be able to beat him like only Mother could?

“Patience, Mycroft,” Lucy had said. “He’ll be along when he’s good and ready.”

Lucy had been certain the new baby Holmes would be a boy. It seems she was right.

“Aren’t you going to hold Sherlock?” he asked quietly.

He picked that name. His parents asked him what he’d call his younger brother or sister and he’d only come up with one name and wanted it for a boy or girl, despite the look he saw his parents exchange when he said that. Sherlock was perfect: it was as unusual as his own name (no sibling of his was going to have a common name), and it just _sounded_ right in his mouth. It was nice to say with its soft first syllable and then the hard second one. Sher- _lock_.

He knew he’d be saying the name a lot, so he wanted it to be a good one.

His mother smiled through her tears and Mycroft relaxed. The baby wasn’t perfect (and why did all parents expect their babies to be perfect?), but things were going to be okay if she was smiling like that now.

“Why don’t you hold your brother first?” she said, glancing at Doctor Monroe.

Doctor Monroe came over to him, bending carefully at the knee to transfer the bundle in his arms to Mycroft’s. In preparation for this moment, Mycroft had learned how to hold a baby, and he dutifully made sure that Sherlock was well-supported, especially at the head. He looked down at the baby with awe, taking in the strange markings, the rosy cheeks and lips, and the intelligent spark in the baby’s wide blue eyes.

Oh yes, he was going to be smart like Mycroft.

“Hello, Sherlock.”

He _was_ going to be a lot noisier than him, Mycroft decided, because at that moment, the baby began to cry. The sound was high and piercing and Mycroft’s ears were already beginning to hurt. Helplessly, he held the baby out and his mother laughed.

“Give him to me,” she said. “He’s probably hungry.”

 

 

 

Mycroft understood that Sherlock had to stay a secret. When the teachers asked him at school if his mummy had her baby, he told them what he told everyone: the baby died.

This got him many hugs and sympathetic looks, and it also got him various gifts for his mother from the teachers and some of the other boys’ mothers. It always made Mother get this pinched, sad sort of look on her face when he gave her them, so after the first couple of times, he began to give the flowers to his bemused piano teacher and ended up eating most of the chocolates and cakes himself.

Looking back in the future, he will identify this as where his weight problems started. Not that he will ever tell anyone that.

Mycroft understood that Sherlock had to stay a secret because he was different, and people are afraid of things that are different.

“Remember when the boys used to tease you because you were cleverer than them?” Mother asked him one evening. “Sherlock’s a bit like that. People would tease him if they knew he was different, but it would be worse. A lot worse, Mycroft, and they might try to take him away from us. We don’t want that, do we?”

Father had made a _harrumph_ sort of noise and swished his newspaper about a bit. Mother flinched at the sound and Mycroft quickly shook his head.

“No, we don’t,” he’d said.

“Good boy.”

 

 

 

 

Sherlock was somewhat slow to walk and talk. At around the time when he first grew his ‘horns’ (as Mycroft called them then, not knowing yet that they were antlers), he said his first word.

It was ‘My’. Father had laughed and said it was probably Sherlock getting possessive and demanding already, but Mother smiled like she hadn’t done in a long time and said it was Sherlock trying to say his big brother’s name.

Mycroft spent a lot of time trying to get Sherlock to repeat it, trying to get him to add the ‘croft’, but it was a futile exercise as Sherlock only babbled nonsense at him with a grin. As he fell asleep that night with Sherlock curled up beside him though, he felt small fingers fist in his pyjama top and a sleepy whispered ‘My’.

 

 

 

He gave Sherlock the nickname ‘Fawnlock’ when Sherlock was four and about ready to go to school.

Of course, being a secret, Sherlock wasn’t going to go to a school like Mycroft’s. Instead, he got a tutor in the form of Mrs Hudson.

She was a kindly lady, fond of baking and the colour cerise. She was also blind ‘as a post’. That was her little joke, and she laughed gently every time she said it.

It was necessary, having a blind tutor for Sherlock, but it made things difficult when he needed to learn to, say, write his own name.

So Mrs Hudson taught him verbally, reading to him from Braille books, getting him to recite his alphabet and times tables aloud and so on, and Mycroft taught him to read and write under their mother’s guidance.

It was fascinating, watching him grow and learn and become a person, for he was definitely a _person_ even if he wasn’t strictly _human_ and Mycroft loved him fiercely. He’d caught up after his initially slow development and become something of a chatterbox. He was constantly asking questions, and he’d learned the dreaded word: why.

Along with his intellectual progress, he’d changed quite a lot physically from when he was a baby. Sherlock’s ‘horns’ had been steadily growing along with the rest of him, until it was clear from the way they’d started to branch that if Sherlock was ‘part’ anything then he was probably part deer.

There were other signs too. Sherlock had hair on his head (a mop of dark curls that was wholly dissimilar to Mycroft’s thin, strawberry blond hair) but he had downy reddish fur over other parts of his body like his chest, which tapered into a dusting of white fur over his belly. His (velvety soft) ears and tail were shaped like those of a fawn and flicked and twitched absently like Mycroft had seen dogs’ ears and tails do.

He was human enough, and quite content to sit inside reading books or practicing his letters, but Mycroft caught him sometimes, sat by the window and looking out wistfully across the grounds. The books he looked at most often were those with animals in, particularly animals that inhabited woodland areas and Mycroft had to wonder if there wasn’t some animal part of him that longed to be in the forest. He hoped not, because the idea of Sherlock pining for a home other than the one he had here with Mycroft was hard to bear.

Sherlock wasn’t allowed outside much, despite the Holmes manor being very secluded, for fear of him being seen by others. Aside from the Holmes family, Doctor Monroe, and blind Mrs Hudson, the only other people who were aware of Sherlock were the servants, and Father sacked all those he didn’t deem loyal enough the day after Sherlock’s birth before they could see him.

Mycroft had to wonder as well if Sherlock didn’t miss other people. Sherlock had never met anyone his own age. Other than Mycroft, who was still nine years older than him, all his interaction was with adults. As much as that sounded like heaven to Mycroft, he could appreciate that it wasn’t… well, normal.

It wasn’t fair either, and he tried to make up for it as much as he could by spending a great deal of time with Sherlock, teaching and encouraging him and making his life as normal as possible, but one day Sherlock asked the question Mycroft had been fearing for some time: “why don’t I look like other people?”

“Because you’re special, Sherlock,” he said. It was the answer he’d prepared in advance, expecting Sherlock to accept it without question. Sherlock loved being called special and clever and brilliant, especially when it was Mycroft calling him those things.

“You’re special, and you don’t look like this.”

“I’m not as special as you.”

“You’re cleverer,” Sherlock said, with all the certainty of childhood, and heaved himself onto Mycroft’s lap.

Mycroft winced, dropped his psychology textbook, and adjusted his hold on Sherlock to make them both more comfortable, moving his chin to stop Sherlock’s small antlers digging into his throat.

They were sat in Mycroft’s bedroom where Sherlock had been carefully painting a family portrait for Mrs Hudson (“I’ll tell her what’s in it so she can see it that way”). Mycroft looked over at it and berated himself for being so occupied with his studies that he’d missed the problem Sherlock was evidently having.

Their brooding father was the largest figure in Sherlock’s creation, painted in dark blues and greys, their mother stood next to him but not holding his hand the way most children would draw their parents. He’d obviously spent more time on painting their mother – her hair, face and bright colouring had a level of detail that their father’s depiction did not.

Flatteringly, his portrayal of Mycroft was most detailed of all, though the roundness of his middle made Mycroft’s mouth pull to one side in dismay. It’s always difficult to see oneself through another’s eyes, he thought. Particularly a child as innocently honest as Sherlock.

The problem was the space next to Mycroft where Sherlock should go. Sherlock had painted what appeared to be a peach blob with black scribbled over the top.

“You’re a better artist than me,” Mycroft said, reaching over Sherlock to pick up the painting. “Look at this – that looks just like me. But where are you, hmm?”

Sherlock miserably pointed at the blob.

“Well,” Mycroft said, trying to keep a smile on his face despite the ache in his chest, “that doesn’t look like you at all. Shall I tell you what you should have drawn?”

Sherlock nodded and pushed his face against Mycroft’s shoulder, his antlers resting against Mycroft’s cheek.

“You should have drawn a little fawn-boy with ears and antlers like the deer have in the books you look at, but smaller, with some dark spots around your eyes and on your cheeks. You should have drawn yourself in your t-shirt and shorts like you are now, with your dark fingers and toes and those brown stripes on your arms. You should draw yourself as you are, Sherlock, because there’s nothing wrong with how you are.”

“Then how come I can’t go to school?” Sherlock mumbled against his shirt. “How come I can’t go outside to play?”

Mycroft sighed, but again these were questions he’d prepared for. “Because people can be mean to special people. Because I don’t want you to get hurt or taken away from us.”

“I don’t want to be taken away from you.”

Mycroft held him tighter. “You won’t be. I won’t let that happen. No one’s going to take my Fawnlock from me, all right?”

 

 

 

True to his word, Mycroft didn’t let Sherlock get taken away.

What happened was this:

When Sherlock was six, a bald man in a wheelchair came to their house and wanted to take Sherlock away to a special school.

Fifteen year old Mycroft wasn’t allowed into Father’s study while they spoke to the strange man, so he paced outside. He knew eavesdropping didn’t become a young man of his breeding, Mother had often said so, but he always learnt a lot from it.

 He heard the man talking to his parents about mutants and acceptance, but it all ceased to matter when he heard Sherlock’s voice pipe up: “Can Mycroft come with me?”

The silence after that was deafening, until the adults started talking loudly and quickly in the way they do when they’re trying to avoid saying one unpleasant truth by covering it up with other, prettier ones.

Mycroft had heard enough about how wonderful this school was and how Sherlock could meet all the other wonderful children and be taught by _wonderful_ people.

As he paced in the corridor where he could no longer hear, he had to admit that it would be for the best if Sherlock went. He could be with children his own age who were special too. No one would tease him there or try to hurt him.

When the meeting was done, Sherlock ran out of the room and straight into Mycroft’s arms, crying and babbling on about how he didn’t want to go if Mycroft wasn’t going to be there.

“Hush,” Mycroft soothed him, stroking over his hair and stubby antlers. “Come on, Fawnlock, it’s a good chance for you. You’ll get to play outside and meet other children who are like you.”

Their parents and the man from the school had arrived at this point to watch the two of them and hear Sherlock’s answer. Mycroft glared. If he wasn’t allowed in during their conversation, they shouldn’t be privy to his.

Sherlock just shook his head and left wet marks on Mycroft’s shirt where his eyes and nose had been.

In the end, Sherlock didn’t go to the school. He refused, despite even Mycroft’s encouragement, and the bald man left with their mother fervently saying that Sherlock was just ‘too young’ at the moment to know what he wanted and asking the man if he could come back in a couple of years’ time.

The man said he could not guarantee that he would return.

 

 

 

In the end, Sherlock resented him for the decision he had made the way Mycroft knew he would. They grew older and Sherlock developed more independence, more of a personality and life outside of Mycroft.

He wanted more than their (admittedly large) house. He wanted to visit the places he saw on the television and in his books, he even wanted to meet people. He wanted more than Mycroft and Mrs Hudson could provide.

He grew into his inordinate intelligence, becoming interested in the sciences, and chemistry especially. He developed a passion for detective stories and crime dramas, and an uncanny knack for reading people and situations from so many hours spent people watching – either in the house or on the television. The intelligence only lead to more questions, more frustration when things were denied to him.

Sherlock stopped crawling into his bed after nightmares. He stopped whining at him until he would play chess with him or read to him or dissect something with him. He told Mycroft to stop calling him Fawnlock because he ‘wasn’t a baby or a fawn anymore’.

In short, they grew apart, and when Mycroft was eighteen and Sherlock was nine, they had their biggest argument to date.

Mycroft was about to leave for Oxford and Sherlock was bitter that he would probably never be going.

“Sherlock, I’ll be back during the holidays.”

“You don’t get it!” Sherlock huffed and stomped. “It’s not always about you, Mycroft! This is about me and the fact that when you go I’ll have _no one_! I’ll just have Mother and Mrs Hudson who don’t challenge me, and Father who does nothing _but_ challenge me because he hates me!”

“You’re being childish. He doesn’t hate you, and I can’t put my life on hold for you.”

Sherlock deflated at that. He reared back as if he’d been slapped. His ears drooped, which would have been comical had it not been so devastating.

Mycroft felt awful at once. “Sherlock, I didn’t mean-”

“You did,” Sherlock said, and then he turned and ran up the stairs without saying goodbye.

In Oxford a week later, Mycroft got the news that Sherlock had ran away.


	2. Chapter 2

The cottage in the woods was not his idea.

When John Watson was invalided back to England from Afghanistan – no home, no job, no career prospects with an intermittent tremor in his dominant hand and a limp that was supposedly psychosomatic but wouldn’t go away no matter how hard he _wished_ it would – he ended up going to his sister for help. He’d scoffed at Mike Stamford when he suggested it after their chance meeting in London, but even then he knew it was inevitable. He simply couldn’t afford to stay in London without a flatmate. And, as he thought, there were no takers on that front.

So he asked Harry if she would put him up for a bit. She agreed, and he put up with her crashing around after her nights out, bringing home a string of different women (fine by John, but did she have to be so _loud_?), and occasionally vomiting over the shoe rack (always into his shoes, never her own) for three whole months. But after yet another argument over her divorce-related binges, she got to thinking about their estranged uncle.

Alcoholism, depression, and eccentricity were the go-to faults of the Watson family, and Uncle Edward just happened to be one of the unlucky ones who had problems with all three. He also happened to be the most affluent family member because life could only kick you in the face so many times. Or so John thought before he was shot in the shoulder.

As the most affluent Watson though, Edward kept two properties – one was a London flat where he spent the majority of his days when he wasn’t jetting off to the Bahamas or some such place; the other was a woodland cottage in Gloucestershire. A woodland cottage that John knew his uncle had bought many years ago on a whim and abandoned not long after when he decided he ‘hated the smell of abundant grass and trees’. He’d never sold the place though. Something to do with the cottage being undesirable, haunted as it apparently was by a strange deer-man creature who lived in the surrounding forest.

John remained grateful that his sister’s drinking problem had never become so bad that she began to see half-human hybrids.

Drinking problem or no, Harry was always a very practical woman in her lucid periods, and she suggested that he get in touch with their uncle if he was desperate to live somewhere cheap (or free, if he could swing it) without the pungent fumes of vodka and sometimes vomit.

“You always were that old bastard’s favourite,” she’d said.

John had to admit that she was right. Uncle Edward favoured him because he was a childless widower who had always wanted a dutiful son (which John was) and never wanted an unruly daughter (which Harry was since _birth_ ).

To be frank, John hated the man and the idea of living away from London in the _forest_ like a wild man, but he really was quite penniless and Harry’s nights out really were quite frequent. She had no qualms about him living there, but by God was he ready to live independently again.

He made the call, pride be damned, and was a bit taken aback when his uncle (whom he had not spoken with in over three years) actually cackled down the line at him and said the key was under the ‘fuck off’ mat on the cottage’s porch. He was also given a stern warning about the deer-man, which he tolerated with a roll of his eyes. Not like it could be seen over the phone.

His therapist was delighted when he told her he was considering the idea of moving to the country. She thought it would do him and his PTSD immense good to be away from the hustle and bustle of crowded, stressful London.

So he packed up his meagre possessions into a single box and a single bag and took himself off to Gloucestershire on the train where he called in a favour from an old friend living in the area and she kindly agreed to drive him to his new abode.

“It’s all a bit fairy-tale, this,” she’d said as they got near. “I mean, a cottage in the woods? Are you going to be the new wicked witch, John?”

“I’ve only got to watch out for the odd fictitious creature,” he’d said with a laugh.

She left him when the road began to get a bit too… not-road-like at all.

“It’s fine,” John said, waving her off. “I know the way from here.”

Or, rather, he sort of remembered that it wasn’t _too_ long a walk the last time he came here when his uncle first bought the place. He wasn’t sure whether to be angrier with his crazy uncle for buying the cottage or with the crazy person who had it built in the _middle of fucking nowhere._

He had a compass and map, his cane, a bag on his good shoulder, a box under his arm, and only two hands. He had advanced navigation training courtesy of the British Army. This was going to be fine.

 

 

 

If John had to sum up the cottage in one word, it would be dusty. As soon as he unlocked and opened the door he had to wonder how bad it _had_ been before his uncle had sent someone to ‘straighten things up’ ready for him a couple of days ago. The converted barn had a distinct musty smell that he could only hope he would acclimatise to quickly.

Looking around, the cottage wasn’t like he remembered at all, but he had been a child when he last visited.

It was furnished, handily, with a plush-looking fabric sofa in the living room facing a log fire. The kitchen was a decent size and had an AGA cooker and a large wooden dining table that could fit six people around it. It made him feel slightly uncomfortable to look at the chairs around the table and realise he’d probably be eating alone here, unless he wanted to walk the necessary miles into town to make friends. In his current state of mind, with his cane, exhausted and in pain just from walking from the car, he wasn’t sure that he did.

Since coming back from Afghanistan, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be bothered with such things in general. Speaking to people seemed pointless – it seemed like conversations were always centred on such trivial things after what he’d seen.

Nothing exciting ever happened. Everything was always grey and ordinary and _dull_.

Especially him, now. Maybe he’d be a bit more interesting for having lived as a loner in the woods with only the wildlife for company. He shook off his maudlin thoughts with a grin and carried on with his self-guided tour.

There was a single bedroom with a double bed (the sheets looked clean, at the least), a desk, and a wardrobe. He opened the wardrobe and was relieved to find it empty save for a few hangers – he’d been expecting fur coats with mothballs for some reason, maybe a portal to Narnia.

The bathroom was small but adequate with fixings in an alarming shade of green. As predicted, the water pressure was poor, but he was grateful to have running water at all in a place this isolated.

Overall, damp and dust and smell aside, it was a nice place. It was curiously homey. Perhaps the feeling was the result of being in the desert for too long and living and working in the city for too long before that. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but he just got a good vibe from the place. He’d never been one to feel such things, but perhaps, in this fresh start of his, there was a first time for everything.


End file.
